Gravebound
The Gravebound were a group of people from the middle centuries of the Millennial Calm who endeavored to go beyond where all other space travellers had gone. Their name is said to have originally come from knowing that if they undertook such a long journey, they would not return alive, and their ship would be their tomb. They were something of a cult, believing fervently that they could find a new world past the horizons of Ealdremen and that a god of some sort was calling them beyond. For years, they toiled with Beyne's top engineers to create a ship that would be capable of reaching "the end of Ealdremen". However, the engineers abruptly abandoned the project, but it was close enough to completion that the Gravebound were able to finish it themselves, and they took flight in the year 3409, nearly fifty years after their initial founding. Along the way, they transmitted information and photographs of interstellar phenomena to other organizations back on Ealdremen's inner, habitable planets, especially Zenda Corporation. The Gravebound are consequently credited as the source for a great deal of information about Ealdremen past the reaches of Beyne. However, it was soon revealed how the Gravebound intended to make this journey despite impossibly hazardous conditions in the ship and being unable to stop for supplies -- by way of necromancy, they made themselves undead, no longer requiring food, sleep, or even breathable air. In these sacrifices, they essentially created a pod that no longer had to sustain life and could consequently have "more important" features focused on, such as speed. They managed to reach as far as Kuldenai, the second-farthest planet in all of Ealdremen, in the year 3418, where communications suddenly went dark. The Gravebound are assumed to have perished somewhere on or around Kuldenai; distant satellite readings detected their crashed spaceship, but no sign of their bodies. A Zenda Corp file was lost or hidden away that detailed some conversations with the Gravebound prior to their disappearance -- it wasn't until the year 3803, almost four hundred years later, that it was found again and kickstarted the organization's focus on a particular star in Ealdremen. The file detailed a conversation with the Gravebound where they said they were "chasing" a blindingly white star that was always just out of reach. They called the star al-Kaniali and seemed to believe that because they had given up everything, even their own lives, al-Kaniali would serve as their guiding star in bringing them to a new world. Not even a day later, communication with the Gravebound was cut, and they were never heard from again. 3421 Zenda Corp Note A miscellaneous note dated from 3421 on the Zenda Corp file pertaining to the Gravebound simply read, "I destroyed the recording. I had to. I don't want anyone to ever hear that laugh again -- to hear that madness, to witness that level of depravity, to know that they stole away a child's innocence for the sake of their twisted schemes. "Why did they bring a child aboard their ship? The way that child laughed -- I'm sure he didn't even know what was going on. They never mentioned a child before that. Surely keeping it hidden from us so we couldn't turn away the information they had damned themselves to send back to us. But how did they keep him secret for so long? "I can only hope that child never realized what was going on around him -- and that whatever they did, whatever happened to them, he died before he knew what was happening." Category:Ealdremen Groups Category:Ealdremen Religions Category:No Spoilers